The Mach E is taking a lot of stick at the moment and although Mustang fans aren’t happy about their iconic sportscar being turned into an electric SUV, this is not the first time Ford has been guilty of coming up with a rather bizarre battery powered vehicle. Can you guess what one of the others was called? We’ll give you a moment to, ahem, think...

That’s right, the Th!nk and nope, that is not a typo it really did have an exclamation mark in the middle of its name. Incredibly, that wasn’t just what was weird about it.

It all started back in the Nineties when a now-defunct Norwegian car manufacturer — Pivco — built a two-plus-two tiny subcompact electric city car with some help from Lotus. They named it the PIV4 but sadly, Pivco went bust but Ford saw this as the perfect opportunity to get ahead of everyone else in the EV market — which didn’t really exist back then — with a ready-made car. All they would need to do was to stick a Ford badge on it and so they picked up a majority stake in 2002 and rebranded the model as the Ford Th!nk.

The initial concept was bad, but the execution was worse. It had an outrageous price tag of $36,495 and looked like an expensive go-kart. They built 1,005 of them and soon the complaints came flooding in for it being too slow and having a very lousy range of just over 80km. Ford stopped production but then a high-profile controversy broke when the carmaker tried to crush the remaining units. Environmentalists protested and forced Ford to relent. It was a highly embarrassing situation that could have been avoided if only they thought about they were getting into with the Th!nk...

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